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Tragedy alert: The Crabtree Swim Club has torn down its existing pool house.

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The former ladies room at the Crabshack

Only two demolition permits were issued last week; that pool house project, and an odd one described as a “demolition for house move” with a listed address of 222 West Hargett Street.

Those of you unfamiliar with Raleigh’s City Government may not realize this, but 222 West Hargett is currently the home of the City Council and a number of government offices, and we’re pretty sure it’s not being demolished. At least not until that brand-new government campus we mentioned last week gets built.

So what gives? Apparently there was a mix-up on the permit and the owner address was duplicated in the project address field on the permits, as the owner is listed as the City of Raleigh with an address of 222 West Hargett. It turns out there is a house being moved, but that’s a project for another day. Today: The Crabtree Swim Club.

Per Wake County records, it appears the Crabtree Swim Club, nee the Glen Forest Swim Cub, was first established in the late 1960s. In 1967, the Glen Forest Swim Club, Inc. purchased the land at 3305 Fairhill Drive; that same year, a 540 square-foot “bath house” was also constructed.

The swim club in 1996

That same bath house appears to be the subject of last week’s demolition permit, which will apparently be torn down for $50,000(!) by Sigmon Construction.

On Friday, December 16, there was a post that started off with the following:

Hello Crabtree! Tomorrow is the big day, the Crabshack Smash! Please come down anytime after 9:00 a.m., even if it’s only an hour, and help us complete the demolition of our 50 year old building.

It appears they were seeking volunteers to come out and help with the teardown — we wish we’d known about this, honestly, it sounded like fun — so we’re not sure what Sigmon would be getting $50 grand for.

The so-called Crabshack Smash is apparently part of a larger remodeling project, per a Facebook post from October:

Hello Crabtree — It’s official, we are pursuing our new bathroom and snackshack facility project this year with projected completion next spring! We have at least one round of permit approval reviews before we can decide for sure if the project has enough time for completion. One round of reviews takes about a month. We can handle two rounds of approvals and still have a large enough window of time for the project but if we need three rounds there is a chance the project is delayed until 2017 because of time constraints. Even with one or two rounds of permitting there is the chance that the pool does not open in May as usual. We will keep you posted on any progress or change in status. Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

The Crabshack

I have to admit, Crabshack is a pretty clever name. On a small side note, my family belonged to a small, local pool club like this growing up, and all I remember about the “snack shack” was that it had vending machines selling cream sodas and those Planters Peanut Bars, which made for quite the delicious combination. I imagine whatever’s coming next for the Crabtree Swim Club will be a good deal more impressive than a couple of dated vending machines; hopefully, they’ll be finished in time for their regular spring opening.

And for those of you who, like me, were unable to attend the Crabshack Smash this past weekend, one of the members put together a cool time-lapse video of the teardown on YouTube. Hopefully it’ll stay up, despite using copyrighted music from AC/DC, but if you happen to come across this post at some point in the future and the video is gone, I’ve got it saved on my hard drive, so just leave a comment and I’ll upload it to Vimeo or something.